Revelation 20:15 states that anyone not found written in the Book of Life is 'cast into the lake of fire' — an eternal, disproportionate punishment (infinite torment for finite sin) that makes God a cosmic torturer.

The genre of Revelation must be taken seriously as a controlling interpretive constraint: the book announces itself in its opening verse as material that is 'signified' (Gk. esēmanen, Rev 1:1, cognate with 'sign'), and is saturated throughout with deliberately non-literal, symbolic imagery — beasts with multiple heads, bowls, seals, a woman clothed with the sun. The 'lake of fire' itself is explicitly glossed by the text as symbol within the same passage: 'Then Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. This is the second death, the lake of fire' (20:14) — an abstraction (Death) and a place-concept (Hades) are themselves 'thrown' into it, which only makes sense if the image functions as a symbol for definitive, final separation from life and God rather than a literal geographic location with literal combustion. Major commentators on Revelation's genre (G. K. Beale, Richard Bauckham) stress this deliberately symbolic idiom runs through the whole book and should not be flattened into a literal physical description any more than the beasts or bowls should be. That said, honest engagement should not use genre alone to dissolve the underlying doctrine: even under a thoroughly symbolic reading, historic mainstream Christian teaching (Augustine, Aquinas) has affirmed some form of genuinely everlasting, conscious separation from God for the finally unrepentant, and this remains among the most difficult doctrines in Christian theology — a real concession, not evasion. What should also be stated honestly is the genuine internal diversity within the Christian tradition on this exact point, which the objection's framing (as though 'the' Christian doctrine of hell is univocal, maximal eternal conscious torment) does not acknowledge: conditional immortality/annihilationism — the view that the finally unrepentant cease to exist rather than suffer endlessly — has been held by serious evangelical scholars (Edward Fudge, *The Fire That Consumes*; John Stott expressed sympathetic openness to the position), reading 'second death' at face value as death, i.e., cessation, not endless torment. Even more strikingly, the ante-Nicene father Gregory of Nyssa (and, more controversially, Origen) held versions of apokatastasis, the eventual universal restoration of all rational creatures — a minority but genuinely ancient position within the tradition, not a modern liberal innovation. The objection's 'infinite punishment for finite sin is obviously disproportionate' inference also quietly assumes that the severity of an offense is a function only of its temporal duration, rather than (per classical theism, Anselm's *Cur Deus Homo*) also a function of the infinite worth and dignity of the One offended — a substantive theological premise the objection needs but does not argue for, which is itself a form of begging the question against the very framework being assessed.

C. S. Lewis's account (*The Problem of Pain*, *The Great Divorce*) frames hell not as external divine torture inflicted on an unwilling victim but as the ultimate, freely chosen terminus of a soul's persistent self-orientation away from the source of all goodness and joy — 'the doors of hell are locked on the inside.' A love that could not be freely refused would not be love at all; the alternative, a God who overrides all creaturely freedom to force universal union with himself, is arguably a lesser good, not a greater one. The 'Book of Life' image itself (echoing Exod 32:32-33, Ps 69:28, Dan 12:1 — an ANE royal-court citizenship-register idiom) frames final judgment in relational, covenantal terms — belonging to the community of the redeemed — rather than as an arbitrary, capricious divine whim-list.